As in whether @ironmoth will go full Jim Corr?
3 Likes
There was a doctor on the media last weekā¦ Forget his name but heās knownā¦ And he reckons that masks are good because they help transmit a little bit of covid ā¦ So little that we donāt get infected but instead build immunityā¦ so we donāt need a vaccine, we just need to transmit a ālittleā bit of covid.
They have a false positivity rate 1-3% . Our positivity rate is 2%.
We are facing into choppy waters. This virus is vindictive, jealous and thrives on people having the craic (in pubs, without food, specifically).
People need to learn that the new normal is to stay at home, on your own, in the dark, making no noise, listening to some over paid RTE heads because some lad, who last year predicted 10 million deaths from the virus, is now predicting that 10 MILLION PEOPLE will DIE if you dont
2 Likes
Some lads are throwing around big lumps of COVID. That has to stop
He is some WUM.
Real rock stars would be banging lines off a Brazilian covid patient fresh off a plane that @Batigol left in, at a house party in dame Lane with the bartender from D2.
We had refrigerated trucks ready to use too.
1 Like
The new normal.
Thereāll only be flights to London in a few years, and theyāll be 500 quid one way.
Heās the least hateful of the celebrity doctors. He comes across as the most honest. Heāll just sat āhand washing is a load of bollocksā or whatever.
That fella has flip flopped more times over the course of this crisis.
Sheās training to be a doc is she? ---- While we cant have any old headbanger on saying open it up ta fuck, some of these medical experts want to live in zero covid land - which is bat-shit crazy and just not viable. They have to be called out on it.
1 Like
Kenny has described OāNeill as āas rare a creature and exotic a discovery as the Galapagos Islandsā.
Christ almighty. Is it any wonder the media dont ask hard questions when they are in thrall to their guest. Its embarrassing.
These professors are really in such lofty heights or academic snobbery that they almost feel that they cannot be challenged and our media think its a personal development and learning exercise for themselves like a tutorial.
Sure the only challenge they get in the media is when they challenge themselves and contradict things theyāve already told us (as facts).
Not one journalist in the country seems to be asking a few hard questions
1 Like
They want a Zero COVID island. Lock everything down until COVID goes. Then open and it comes back.
So they want a Zero COVID Europe. Lock the entire continent down until it goes. Then open and it comes from Asia. Or the US.
Itās a completely unrealistic and hilariously unsubstainable policy
1 Like
The media fawned in a similar fashion over Varoufakis because he drove a motorbike and gave good copy and even though he was exposed as a fraud when he left academia and was given actual responsibility heās still a rent a quote
3 Likes
Hopefully the HSE and NPHET have secured the required dosages of the flu vaccine. Itās all centralised this year. No workplace vaccine programmes allowed.
First offā¦ Iām not a doctor nor an epidemiologist. I am not here to measure mine or indeed anyone elses on this forum.
I have kept up with this thread, as lets face it, itās all anyone talks about at the moment. A couple of issues with some of the posts here, not isolating @ironmoth here, I merely picked out his post as it was laid out well, cogently written and allows me to address some of the stuff in a methodical way, much like to way @ironmoth wrote their email - kudos. However, I would like to add something to a number of the points he made
I would suspect that this routine disclaimer is on every PCR Kit that is sold worldwideā¦ This is boilerplate CYA stuff from any manufacturer. PCR kits are used and sold as diagnostic kits worldwide, even with this little nugget attached. When you meet sales reps in this area, they sell diagnostic kits, not detection kits.
Yesā¦ the same as with any virus really. It is the best available technique for detecting nearly every virus in existence. It detects the viral RNA and like any viral disease, you (not you specifically - the collective you) step back and look at the patient, and assess are the signs consistent with the detection of the virus and make a call. Unfortunately, in this case, not all patients express signs with the virus so you are left in the horrible situation where any viral detection is significant as you are trying to limit the spread of the virus, not the sick patient. The main reason you do this is to reduce the amount of virus circulating in the community to reduce the overall dose that individual patients get.
Like many viruses, Covid is dose dependent, the infectious dose is low. However, if you ramp up the dose that individuals get, you will get younger people getting sick, as even their healthy immune systems will not cope, as they found in China https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30196-1/fulltext.
Unfortunately, rising community levels also mean rising chances of the infection getting into healthcare settings, homes etc, irrespective of how much PPE and barring the staff literally shower-in, shower-out and wear disposable PPE and clothing which they change after contact with every patient which I think even the most belligerent would admit is not practicable.
I read this, and the message I get from this is that there are likely dozens to hundreds of diagnostic companies out there trying to make their own kits so they can get in on the big spend that will inevitably be there over the next couple of years. The WHO and themselves are creating ELISAs and PCR kits to identify this virus, the sensitivity and specificity (the ability to detect positives and negatives in other words) of which will improve all the time. I heard an old adage recently in relation to disease surveillance which was āthe desire to achieve perfection should never be the enemy of the goodā. Most of these current PCR/ELISA kits are good but are not perfectā¦ does that mean you forego their use until you get the perfect one is found? I for one, donāt believe so.
Unfortunately, the WHO cannot stand over every kit made bey every company worldwide and say they are all as good as ours. Each laboratory (WHO or commercial) will try to get an advantage by identifying surface proteins on the virus to detect, I donāt know enough about these proteins to know whether they are unique to Covid - my guess is that this is a hodge-podge of coronaviral mutation that just happens to produce very severe respiratory disease. The problem with that is that the other viruses which may share these surface proteins are still circulating.
In an ideal world, all samples would be tested using a technique called whole genome sequencing, essentially a PCR on anabolic steroids but this is very slow and cannot be ramped up to handle large numbers of samples. There are only a handful of these machines in the country.
As an additional point, much of this diagnostic development has been achieved in 6 months, which in many if not all cases would take years to achieve, as it is slow, methodical, detailed and often spirit crushing work.
Is Optional meant to be Optimal I wonder. I only ask as this statement would make more sense if it was. As @ironmoth said, I cannot find it so I am merely surmising. Again, this does not surprise me, it takes a long time to know the optimal tissue for testing in relation to viral disease. It takes years of testing and eliminating to identify optimal samples. The reason that nasal/throat swabs are used is that this is a known respiratory virus, so the sites that it will initially make contact with are the nose and the throat (or even the tonsils). As coronaviruses use mucosal cells to replicate, you will most likely find it in the mucosa of the nose or the throatā¦ If covid-19 was a faecal-oral spreader then you would likely have to look atā¦ ahemā¦ slightly different sampling techniquesā¦
There is a lot of discussion about false positivesā¦ and they are a real issue but again, they are by the power or numbersā¦ any test giving you 98-99% detection rate is a good testā¦ the issue is when you roll that out over millions of tests, that 1 percent is thousands.
However, I for one donāt think its fair to focus in on the false positive rate without looking at the false negative rate, these things need to be viewed as a whole unit, not focussing on one or the other.
All in all, I donāt know if there is a good job or otherwise being done with this disease, in reality, we will only be able to truly know that in retrospect. Its easy, for us as citizens, to sit on the hedge and throw abuse at the people on the pitch.
I think NPHET have a very difficult job. As medical doctors and epidemioplogists, they are expected to have all the answers, they donāt and are being demonised for it, I liked a suggestion I saw recently on adding an economist or two to the group to perhaps widen the thinking within it. The scary thought is that we will likely only know enough about this disease when the pandemic is over and just in time for the next one. Our economy is in tattersā¦ Its easy to say OIUTF but in the limited opening we have had, numbers of infections have risen substantially, despite hand washing, mask wearing etc. Its also easy to say it wonāt affect us, but as I have mentioned above, if the amount of virus increases, the dose goes up and in turn, the here-to-fore unaffected start to get very sick and maybe even die.
I cannot think of a single person in this country who enjoys the state we find ourselves in now. We all have elderly parents and maybe even grandparents who have worked all their lives to support us. The last thing they deserve is to die alone without a relative to hold their hand as many did in April and May. Are their lives less or more valuable than the working man with three children who is out of work for 6 monthsā¦ thatās the call our government has to makeā¦ I donāt envy them!
Again - Iām not picking a fight with @ironmoth, his post was well written and cogently laid out.
14 Likes